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FATHER PETER MCVERRY has said that there is no chance that hotels will no longer be used to provide emergency accommodation for homeless families by the beginning of July.
Speaking to Ivan Yates on Newstalk, McVerry said that Housing Minister Simon Coveney is a “good man” but that the problem of homelessness is now “out of control”.
The homeless campaigner said that it is clear that Coveney’s proposals to alleviate the homelessness crisis “are just not working”.
Worsening problem
As recently as March, Coveney has reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that hotels will no longer be used to house homeless families by July of this year.
The use of hotel and B&Bs to house homeless families has skyrocketed over the past number of years and the homelessness crisis has worsened in Dublin.
Latest figures from the Housing Department show that there 1091 homeless families with 2,046 children staying in emergency accommodation in Dublin in April. The overwhelming majority of these were staying in private hotels or B&Bs at a huge cost to the state.
Dublin City Council spent €40 million trying to house homeless families in hotels and B&Bs in 2016 alone.
Coveney first committed to ending the use of hotels to house homeless families by the middle of this year last summer in the Government’s Rebuilding Ireland Housing Action Plan.
Charity experts expressed serious doubt that this being possible at the time, however Coveney today remained resolute that the goal could be achieved.
“Out of control”
McVerry began by saying that getting homeless families out of hotels is “not going to happen by the first of July, that’s for sure”.
He began by praising Simon Coveney, saying he had “a lot of respect for him” and that he had “tried very hard to address this problem”.
It was clear, McVerry said, that these measures were simply not working. He said:
The Minister has produced very detailed comprehensive proposals to solve the problem but he produced those eight/nine months ago and the problem continues to get worse, so to my mind they’re just not working. So I think the problem out of control.
He said that the problem was primarily in the private rental sector with families made homeless either because “the rents have gone through the roof and they can no longer afford them”, “the banks have repossessed the home that they’re living in” or “the landlord wants to sell the house”.
Introducing caps on rising rents in line with inflation and legislation to prevent evictions would go some way towards alleviating the problems in the private rental sector, he said.
McVerry added that is essential that the government find the means to convert the empty houses and apartments around the country into available housing.
Advocating going down the “compulsory purchase route” of these empty units, he said “it’s that sort of radical action… that we need to solve what I believe is a problem that is now out of control”.
He concluded by drawing a comparison between the homelessness crisis now and during the Famine:
It’s absolutely absurd. This is like the famine times. People were evicted onto the street because they couldn’t pay the rent.
This FactCheck, from TheJournal.ie, examined an earlier claim from McVerry that there was more people homeless in Ireland now than at any point since the Famine. We rated the claim “mostly false”.
With reporting from Cormac Fitzgerald
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Shane on every Irish MEP who voted down these amendments, I’d wager all of their salaries none of them can adequately explain what they were voting on, the possible consequences of the vote or even why they voted how they did
*Shame
I doubt half of them even read the whole bill.
How can we find out who voted and what way they voted?
…they didn’t read it cos Fidelma forgot the Whiffy code. again….
After she was R/Fraped on Facebook
As long as I can still see the sexy ladies tis grand!!
Laying the groundwork for TTIP…
You certainly hit the nail on the head with that one.
The US just signed the Cisa Cybersecurity bill yesterday …27 October
Cisa would “allow ‘voluntary’ sharing of heretofore private information with the government, allowing secret and ad hoc privacy intrusions in place of meaningful consideration of the privacy concerns of all Americans,” the professors wrote.
The data in question would come from private industry, which mines everything from credit card statements to prescription drug purchase records to target advertising and tweak product lines. Indeed, much of it is detailed financial and health information the government has never had access to in any form. The bill’s proponents said the data would be “anonymized”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/27/cisa-cybersecurity-bill-senate-vote
I think we’ll all end up partying like it’s 1984 sooner than anyone could imagine.
Sounds like the Eurocrats really thought this one through….not
The internet was bad enough with a small number of companies buying up everything in site but its rightly f##cked now. This only favours big business. Just a few fig leaves thrown in to make it seem reasonable.
Amazing the admission from MEPs that they voted for full package as they were so keen to get the, voter popular, roaming free charges in place. Incredibly short sighted, as for the comment from KevJ that it would be amazing if “half of them read the bill” – not a hope in hell. From experience the number of those MEP who read the bill would be somewhere in the region of a dozen or so.
Most of the MEPs would have been handed a sheet from their EP political groups. On the sheet is the title of the legislation being voted on then a series of numbers (indicating the amendment) and ‘guidance’ from the parties on whether to Yes, No or Abstain.
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